Stephen Allen is media director of Lightvert, which is one of the start-up companies looking to change the way advertising interacts with the consumer outside the home.

The outside world has always been something that’s fascinated sci-fi writers and moviemakers. The latest Hollywood blockbuster, Ghost in the Shell, predicts a future where the city skylines are dominated with advertising holograms. This movie follows in the footsteps of The Fifth Element, Blade Runner, Minority Report and others, all of which attempted to predict the omnipresent nature of advertising in our cityscapes.

The digital-out-of-home advertising sector is speeding us towards the future predicted by Hollywood, but which technologies will come to the fore sooner rather than later? Lightvert is the company behind ECHO, a new advertising technology that allows fleeting images up to 200m tall appear like magic in the eye of a passer-by. When our eyes are exposed to light they experience a ‘persistence of vision’ effect, which causes that light to linger in our eyes even when we’ve looked away. Lightvert has leveraged this biological quirk to create hyperscale adverts that appear almost like magic to the viewer. They will be the largest in the world, bringing this technologically advanced future envisaged in sci-fi movies closer to reality.

How ECHO works:

“Popular culture is often fascinated with how a future society might interact with advertising media and technologies. I’ve listed some of my favourite examples of when Hollywood helped to predict the future or drive us towards it.

Advertising that defies dimensions

ECHO is a one-dimensional technology that uses our natural biology to ‘print’ a 2D image on to our eyes. Ghost in the Shell proposes a future with advertising holograms that fill the city skyline. Companies like Moon Media experimenting with Pepper’s Ghost, a centuries old hologram trick that combines 2D projection with mirror reflections to create the illusion of a 3D image. I can well believe that our own ECHO technology will inspire a new generation of advertising technologies that play with dimensions to recreate the Pepper’s Ghost illusion on a huge scale. Fittingly that’s the most likely way the physics would work for the advertising holograms that appear in Ghost in the Shell.

Personalised AR

For most people, Pokémon Go was the first time AR (Augmented Reality) had been brought to the mainstream. Where Virtual Reality immerses you in a new world, AR provides entertaining or informative data as an overlay to the real world. Movies such as Avatar and Minority Report have all toyed with ways that this might happen, using clear tablets or headsets.

Make no mistake, AR is coming, and it’s going to make information incredibly personal. The user can decide what they see, and their AR devices will know a lot about them. This will lead to localised choice over content, providing the viewer with the ability to opt out, or see ads that only appeal to them. This is a future in advertising where a new parent will be targeted with an ad for an SUV, while the football star looking at the same ad will see a sports car instead.

Companies like VRtize have already developed platforms that will bring this experience to the public. Once AR devices become the norm, I can imagine that traditional billboards will even be replaced with large blank spaces, canvasses on which hyperscale AR ads can be displayed.

Machine Learning with connected ads

Movies like Terminator and The Matrix propose dystopian futures where artificially intelligent machines are the dominant species on Earth. While we’re not at the technologic apocalypse just yet, machines are starting to think by themselves.

Machine Learning is already happening in computing, and it won’t be long before this starts to permeate into the outdoor environment. Digital billboards and adverts are connected to the internet now, which means they have the capacity to learn like any other computer. Imagine a network of adverts that can respond to events in real time, dynamically programming their advertising to you depending on your likely mood. This is a world where an ad will switch to promoting you a hot cup of coffee if it starts snowing, even if it’s only a local flurry.

Human-like thinking already exists in advertising technology, with companies such as Linkett providing the tools for advertisers to adapt their adverts according to what’s happening in the real world.

Retail shopping, but more personal

Do you remember the scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise enters a shop and a voice from nowhere offers to sell him his favourite white T-shirt? We’re used to this kind of personal recommendation in the online world, but this technology is starting to seep into the retail environment. The company BlueBroadcaster has created a platform for advertisers to provide personalised adverts inside stores and at point-of-sale. They use wi-fi and bluetooth technologies to tap into your buying habits, which, as it becomes more refined, will eventually lead to the personal shopping assistant predicted in Minority Report.

Li-Fi

Just about every sci-fi franchise from Star Wars to Star Trek predicts a future where connectivity happens at lightning speeds and with unparalleled stability. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, they go a step further in suggesting we might one day be able to pick up an internet signal anywhere in the universe. We won’t be seeing that kind of connectivity quite yet, however the next revolution is still pretty astounding, and it’s called Li-Fi.

Li-Fi uses light as a connectivity method, which means any light source can become a router. You’ve probably heard by now that light travels quickly. That’s a good thing when it comes to communication because it means you can encode a lot of information.

In terms of advertising, the benefit of Li-Fi over wi-fi is more than just speed. It’s directional, so at any one time you will know where all your users are. This makes it incredibly easy for an outdoor advertiser to track passing footfall, knowing the precise location of potential customers.

Hollywood is scarily accurate when it comes to predicting technology trends, which is often due to the fact that they inspire the next generation of inventors and engineers. Only time will tell whether new movies like Ghost in the Shell are also accurate in predicting the future.”